This is not about the early game show that was on in the late-40s and early-50s called Winner Take All, but about game shows that have "winner-take-all" rules and nothing else, like Match Game in 1990 on ABC, Now You See It in 1989 on CBS, Bruce Forsyth's Hot Streak in early '86 on ABC, and The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime (also in 1986 in syndication). What baffles me about it, and what I would like to know is, why were players on those shows only credited with sums of money for right answers, but could not actually keep that money unless the game was won? I mean, consider-- a player goes to all that trouble to appear on a certain game show, and plays as well as he/she can, but because of winner-take-all rules (and rotten luck), gets nothing but parting gifts. What I think would have been fairer is if you got points for right answers, and then had those points converted into dollars if you won-- nope, can't have that, was the showrunners' thought process; let's make them think they're winning money, but withhold it if the game is not won. This really bothered me on Match Game in 1990 on ABC, especially in the second Match-Up round (the sub-round where you had a choice of answer, chose which one you thought best, and the celebrity had to agree for you to score; the second one had it at $100/pop for 45 seconds). The part that bothered me is if you had a good chance to win (not far behind), but the celeb you chose refused almost every choice you made and chose otherwise, and you still lost. This is not to say that all such shows have been unfair to that level-- Jeopardy! is a winner-take-all game, but at least the runners-up get small sums of money ($2,000 for second, and $1,000 for third), and Tic Tac Dough was a kind of W-T-A, but there, you were playing for a pot that the winner won, and (starting in 1979) if you were a challenger who had at least one tie in a losing effort to the champion, you did get $250 per tie (N/A, of course, if you managed to be champion). So, all this long-windedness off my chest, I would like to know why some game shows would have set up their rulesets this way.
